stand at the City Hall. It hit me that all those last blasts of a football-obsessed childhood were fading, corroding faster than I had ever anticipated in this short burst of summer towards something entirely new and out of time altogether.
Even before Sabine, I had concocted a strategy to spend as much time at The Pound as possible. I had told my father I was sleeping over in Padre Pio’s house, where I had spent much of June watching the World Cup matches on his colour TV and heading out afterwards to our free floodlit ‘pitch’ at the back of Inglis’s bakery to play five-a-side into the early hours of the morning. PP was always in foul humour when we were going back to his house to bed. He was a shite player and was always picked last. I’d wait for him to fall asleep before creeping back downstairs to the front parlour, where his mother would be waiting for me on the floral sofa – legs open and propped up on the table, just like that first night a few days after we buried my own mother. Her feet in slippers, the half-empty bottle of vodka, a three-quarters smoked cigarette burning in the ashtray and then her slobbering, her urgings, her orders. On my knees eventually and my head in-between her thighs, spearing her moist pubis with the tip of my tongue while she moaned and groaned in a voice rubbed with smoke and Smirnoff: ‘It’s just a bit of sex, Robert. It’s just a wee bit of sex.’
Truth be told, that’s why I was confident on that first night with Sabine. I wasn’t afraid of this standoffish snob with the crimped hair, the white dress and the fishnets that I longed to rip off with my teeth when we finally got to be alone. Padre Pio’s mum had once whispered into my ear when she finally allowed me to bolt inside her that she was giving me ‘an education’.
In the taxi up to the Holy Lands, we snogged for the first time and I tasted a sharp clean laboratorial sensation in her mouth.
‘I thought you only drank Coke,’ I murmured as I tried to slip my hand up her dress.
‘At them there prices, no way,’ she said. ‘They don’t have civilian searchers on the door to check what’s in your bag. I could get a bomb into The Pound if I wanted to. A half bottle of Smirnoff is easy to smuggle inside,’ she continued, while placing her hand on my swelling crotch. ‘I wonder why you,’ she said.
‘Why me what?’ I answered.
‘I never bother with anyone in The Pound. You’re my first. I’m just wondering why you.’
‘Cos I’m special?’ I ventured helpfully, as I slide my hand further up her dress.
‘Maybe,’ she whispered and, gliding the tip of her tongue inside my ear, added, ‘It’s more likely that I’m just feeling particularly horny tonight and I like your T-shirt.’
We must have fucked all night inside 66 Jerusalem Street because when I woke up early the next day my cock was raw and my head was pounding thanks to a half bottle of vodka. Sabine had provided us with a soundtrack for our sex; not Bowie, as I had expected, not even ABBA. Instead we rolled about, she lay astride me, and I took her from behind to the sound of 1950s rock ’n’ roll blaring from a C-60 tape she had put on. I recalled too the way she liked to writhe around when she was on top, like the lithe, sinister dancer at the start of Tales of the Unexpected. The look on her face told you that she was elsewhere, and wherever that was, she was in charge.
Sabine stirred beside me. ‘You’ve obviously done this before, young man, and there was me hoping you’d be a virgin,’ she said with a smirk.
‘Sorry about that, love. Damned inconvenient of me all the same,’ I replied.
‘Where did you learn to screw like that?’ she asked.
‘I could ask you the same question. You are one fine mount.’
‘Oh, I think I was the one doing the mounting, Mr Ruin! But hey, I forgot to ask you something important: what age are you?’
‘Fourteen, mam,’ I joked and got an elbow in the ribs from her. ‘Nah, I’m nineteen. I’m just having a year off before I go to uni,’ I lied. ‘What about you?’
She had wrapped her legs over mine and started to caress my face with her fingers.
‘I am at the art college. It’s only the foundation year but I’m thinking of starting first year proper over in London. Maybe St Martin’s if I can get in. Where have you applied for?’
‘Maybe I’ll head to London too. Perhaps the LSE. My dad thinks I should go there and study economics.’
‘Didn’t Mick Jagger go to the LSE?’
‘I’m not applying there because that wanker went to it!’ I protested.
Sabine put two fingers across my lips and giggled. ‘For fuck’s sake, don’t be applying to the LSE just to follow me to London then.’
As my eyes got used to the milky morning light, I could make out a whitewashed walled room, pine floorboards and piles upon piles of splashes of paint on rectangular field-grey boards. When Sabine got up to go to the bathroom, I went over to examine a mini-tower of her work propped up beside the record player. Low was on the turntable alongside a couple of photos. The most striking image was a side profile of a man, which was blurred by slashes of white, pink and grey streaks shooting off his visage and merging into what seemed to be a kind of gathering storm in the background. I held it up to the window to see it in the morning sunlight.
‘I see you’re admiring my dad,’ Sabine said, as she walked towards me. ‘I took those pics shortly after my mum died. Then I based a painting on them too. We were walking along the beach at Holywood talking about her when I got him to stop and pose.’
‘They’re amazing. I’m jealous,’ was all I could say.
‘I’d never tell him I based a painting on those pictures.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he thinks that the pics I took caught him when he was weak. My dad doesn’t like to look weak.’
‘So what happened to your mum, Sabine?’ I asked, suddenly fearing that she might have been killed in the Troubles and Sabine would hold it against the likes of me.
‘She got ovarian cancer. She went very quickly, Robert.’
I liked the way she said ‘Robert’ for the first time. I nearly forgot to answer when she went on to ask about my own mother.
‘Well that’s a half-snap!’ I replied eventually. ‘I was told it was liver cancer. Sabine, I … I was afraid your mum may have been killed in the Troubles. I was afraid you’d—’
‘I’d what? Blame you? Well, she didn’t and if she had, it would have had nothing to do with you. You are not of them the way I am not one of them, Mr Ruin. We are not like any of them. Our so-called sides. I could tell that about you almost right away.’
‘Most people are sick of all this Troubles shite, Sabine.’
‘Yeah, but most don’t say that loud enough.’
‘You’d get on well with me da,’ I say, as I place the painting back against the record player.
Before it all got too serious, Sabine held out her hand like a debutante at a ball. I nodded formally and kissed her middle knuckle. Then she went rummaging around the side of the bed for her handbag. She plucked out a blister
